Showing results by narrator "Jonathan Yen" in All Categories

In 1940 Pearl Harbor had not yet happened, and America was not yet at war with Japan. But China had been trying to stave off Japanese aggression for three years - and was desperate for aircraft and trained combat pilots. General Chiang Kai-shek sent military aviation advisor Claire Chennault to Washington, where President Roosevelt was sympathetic but knew he could not intervene overtly. Instead he quietly helped Chennault put together a group of American volunteer pilots.

Life is boring: filled with meetings and traffic, errands and emails. Nothing we'd ever call fun. But what if we've gotten fun wrong? In Play Anything, visionary game designer and philosopher Ian Bogost shows how we can overcome our daily anxiety; transforming the boring, ordinary world around us into one of endless, playful possibilities. The key to this playful mindset lies in discovering the secret truth of fun and games.

For 700 years, Japan was ruled by military commanders who waged war against one another incessantly. Shogun tells the fascinating story of Tokugawa Ieyasu, the man who finally unified and brought lasting peace to the nation. He established a new central government which enabled his descendants to rule Japan for the next 260 years—a period in which Japanese culture as we know it today flourished.

Merger Masters presents revealing profiles of monumentally successful merger investors based on interviews with some of the greatest minds to practice the art of arbitrage. Michael Price, John Paulson, Paul Singer, and others offer practical perspectives on how their backgrounds in merger arbitrage helped them make their biggest deals. They share their insights on the discipline that underlies their fortunes, whether they practice the "plain vanilla" strategy of announced deals, the aggressive strategy of activist investment, or any strategy in between on the risk spectrum.

The 1980s marked a revolution in the field of organ transplants, and Bud Shaw, MD, who studied under Tom Starzl in Pittsburgh, was on the front lines. Now retired from active practice, Dr. Shaw relays gripping moments of anguish and elation, frustration and reward, despair and hope in his struggle to save patients. He reveals harshly intimate moments of his medical career.

The resurgence of the electric car in modern life is a tale of adventurers, men and women who bucked the complete dominance of the fossil-fueled car to seek something cleaner, simpler and cheaper. Award-winning former Wall Street Journal reporter John Fialka documents the early days of the electric car, from the MIT/Caltech race between prototypes in the summer of 1968 to the 1987 victory of the Sunraycer in the world's first race featuring solar-powered cars.

Everyone loves adventure, and Otto Penzler has collected the best adventure stories of all time into one mammoth volume. With stories by Jack London, O. Henry, H. Rider Haggard, Alastair MacLean, Talbot Mundy, Cornell Woolrich, and many others, this wide-reaching and fascinating volume contains some of the best characters from the most thrilling adventure tales, including The Cisco Kid.

Everyone knows that the United States of America is made up of 50 states and, uh...some other stuff. The territories of American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the US Virgin Islands are often neglected, but they are filled with American flags and national parks and US post offices and some four million people, many of whom are as proudly red-white-and-blue as any Daughter of the American Revolution.

Gunflint Burning is a comprehensive account of the dramatic events around the Ham Lake fire of 2007, one of the largest wildfires in Minnesota history. In sharp detail, Cary J. Griffith describes the key events of the fire as they unfold, transporting listeners to the front lines of an epic struggle that was at times heroic, tragic, and sublime.

The Moog synthesizer "bent the course of music forever" Rolling Stone declared. Bob Moog, the man who did that bending, was a lovable geek with Einstein hair and pocket protectors. He walked into history in 1964 when his homemade contraption unexpectedly became a sensation-suddenly everyone wanted a Moog. The Moog's gamechanging sounds saturated sixties counterculture and burst into the disco party in the seventies to set off the electronic dance music movement. Bob had singlehandedly founded the synth industry and became a star.

American military bases encircle the globe with nearly 1,000 locations in foreign lands. These bases are usually taken for granted or overlooked entirely. But, in an eye-opening account, Base Nation shows that the worldwide network of bases brings with it a panoply of ills - and actually makes the nation less safe in the long run.

In the summer of 1754, deep in the wilderness of western Pennsylvania, a very young George Washington suffered his first military defeat, and a centuries-old feud between Great Britain and France was rekindled. The war that followed would be fought across virgin territories, from Nova Scotia to the forks of the Ohio River, and it would ultimately decide the fate of the entire North American continent—not just for Great Britain and France but also for the Spanish and Native American populations.

Humans are a puzzling species. On the one hand, we struggle to survive on our own in the wild, often failing to overcome even basic challenges, like obtaining food, building shelters, or avoiding predators. On the other hand, human groups have produced ingenious technologies, sophisticated languages, and complex institutions that have permitted us to successfully expand into a vast range of diverse environments. What has enabled us to dominate the globe, more than any other species, while remaining virtually helpless as lone individuals?

Civil War historian Earl J. Hess presents a compelling biography of Braxton Bragg, the commander of the Confederate Army of Tennessee from the summer of 1862 to the end of 1863.

An entertaining deep dive into muscle, from the discovery of human anatomy to the latest science of strength training.

The concept of personality disorders rose to prominence in the early twentieth century and has consistently caused controversy among psychiatrists, psychologists, and social scientists. In Personality Disorders, Allan V. Horwitz traces the evolution of defining these disorders and the historical dilemmas of attempting to mold them into traditional medical conceptions of disorder.

David Parrish was in disbelief when he learned that 19-year-old Jon Bowie's body had been found hanged from a backstop at the local high school's baseball field and the death declared a suicide. David had known Jon and his twin brother since they were boys. He had coached them on the baseball field and welcomed them into his home for sleepovers with his own sons. However, when David learned how Jon's body was found, he felt compelled to find the facts behind this incomprehensible tragedy.

With unique access to Starbucks personnel and resources, Joseph Michelli discovered that the success of Starbucks is driven by the people who work there—the "partners"—and the special experience they create for each customer. Michelli reveals how you can follow the Starbucks way to reach out to entire communities, listen to individual workers and consumers, and seize growth opportunities in every market. Filled with insider stories, eye-opening anecdotes, and solid strategies, this fascinating book takes you deep inside one of the most talked-about companies in the world today.

You have to talk with a colleague about a fraught situation, but you're worried that they'll yell, or blame you, or shut down. You fear your emotions could block you from a resolution. But you can communicate in a way that's constructive—not combative.

Managing the Unexpected, third edition, is a thoroughly revised text that offers an updated look at the groundbreaking ideas explored in the first and second editions. Revised to reflect events emblematic of the unique challenges that organizations have faced in recent years, including bank failures, intelligence failures, quality failures, and other organizational misfortunes, often sparked by organizational actions, this critical book focuses on why some organizations are better able to sustain high performance in the face of unanticipated change.